Could we build an artificial neutron star?

... to then collapse it into a black hole, to then use the black hole to time travel into the future. If we put neutrons from a neutron generator into a microscopic sphere. We cannot put neutrons together with enough force like a star can with gravity to keep them together as we add more neutrons from the neutron generator. For neutrons to be stable they need to be in a minimum spherical mass of around 0.09 solar masses. We just could not get enough material from the neutron generators to make a neutron star up to this point in mass. If we could make a 0.09 mass of neutron star material we could just park it next to a star, and the neutron star would attract the material from it with gravity, and add the material to its own mass to increase in size, and collapse into a black hole. Are there any other reasons stopping this from working. Thank you for your help.

For neutrons to be stable they need to be in a minimum spherical mass of around 0.09 solar masses.

Good question. Gravity needs to be acting on 1.4 solar masses of confined matter to keep neutrons from decaying into atoms.A neutron on your lab bench is an unstable particle. If left alone it would decay into a proton an electron and a neutrino with a half-life of about 10.3 minutes.So you are limited in the time available for your neutron generator to produce the equivalent of 1.4 Solar masses worth of neutrons. You may be able to achieve it if you can keep the time down to about 1 to 1.5 minutes per 1.4 Solar masses.If you can do that then the Gravitational pressure would make sure that your Neutrons did not have the space to decay into and you would have your Neutron star.This by the way is an amazing neutron generator. What are you using to feed it as raw material?I suppose if you could somehow quickly funnel a large molecular cloud into it's intake....I want to see this machine..

If we could make a 0.09 mass of neutron star material we could just park it next to a star, and the neutron star would attract the material from it with gravity, and add the material to its own mass to increase in size, and collapse into a black hole.

O.09the mass of a Neutron star partly because of the decay reasons above and partly because of the Electromagnetic forces that come into being when a Neutron decays into a Hydrogen atom, would within about 10 to 15 minutes of being made, turn into a rapidly expanding Hydrogen cloud.The rapidity of the expansion would probably be strong enough to blow the outer layers of the companion star that was going to play the part of mass donor.

0.09 solar masses is about 1.8x1028kg, which is a rather large mass for humans to manipulate.The whole Earth has a mass of around 6x1024kg, so we are talking about manipulating something thousands of times more massive than the Earth.

The biggest device we have for manipulating baryons is the Large Hadron Collider, which can hold:

2808 proton bunches, each with around 1011 protons

For a total mass of 5x10-13 kg of protons

And protons are far easier to manipulate than neutrons, due to their positive charge, and the fact that they are stable.

So I suggest that human technology is currently at least 40 orders of magnitude short of producing a minimum-sized stable neutron star.

There is a a slight chance that the LHC could produce a black hole that survives for a tiny instant, if some optimistic (or, if you prefer, pessimistic) versions of string theory happen to be true. But most physicists don't expect to see them.

Micro black holes (of the size that the LHC might produce) wouldn't last long enough to get outside the LHC.

Stellar-mass black holes (of the mass of the Sun) have such strong tidal gradients that they would rip you apart.

Galactic core black holes would have a gentle-enough tides for someone to survive a trip into the black hole; this would allow you to take a 1-way trip a short distance into the future, while the rest of the galaxy takes the same trip 1 second per second. The nearest one we know is about 27,000 light-years away.

I understand that finding a black hole you could (in theory) use for more interesting time travel requires some singularly unlikely events, like locating a "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_singularity [Links inactive - To make links active and clickable, login or click here to register]".